


“A Serious Experiment”

by MissWoodhouse



Category: Little Women (1994), Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: 5 (+1) Things, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Platonic Love, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24444112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissWoodhouse/pseuds/MissWoodhouse
Summary: Five Reasons why Jo and Laurie would make each other Very Miserable IndeedAnd One Reason why it Might Not Be Such A Bad Idea After All.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence & Josephine March
Comments: 3
Kudos: 29





	1. “Our quick tempers and strong wills”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “Days and Days (and days, that’s how it happens)”

Jo knew her Shakespeare (of course she did), and Laurie, for his part, did too.

Certainly they had occasionally fancied themselves Beatrice and Benedick – in all honesty they supposed a minor squabble was as good a way of showing their love as any other. It was fun. What was too easy to forget about Benedick and Beatrice, however, was just how badly things had gone wrong before they went right. Their love story hadn’t always been flirtatious banter – and some couples had the unfortunate luck of getting the order wrong.

One of the upsides to marrying your best friend was in knowing which of each other’s buttons ought to be off-limits during a fight. One of the downsides was the temptation of knowing precisely which ones to push when you decided to do it anyway. Neither Jo nor Laurie had ever held out particularly well against the force of such temptation.

Laurie takes shots at Jo’s “scribblings” and Jo tells him he’s pointlessly whiling his life away. He compares her to her sisters and she makes issue of his parentage – blames him for giving in to the man who drove his father away from home. They scream and rail, and then go silent for days on end – and the fights aren’t fun anymore, they’re just plain mean. Jo says she’d rather be a crusty old spinster like Aunt March [Only, how could she, without Aunt March’s money?] and Laurie tells her she’d be dead in a ditch without him. Amy takes Laurie’s side, usually, tells Jo she’s being immature and ridiculous. Meg stays out of it. Jo thinks Beth would have taken her side, once upon a time when she was still around.

They bicker, and they argue, and they know they’ve been mean and hurtful, but they’re each too prideful, too wounded to be the one who gives first.

They’re lonely. They’ve always been each other’s best friends – the odd ones out from the crowd, but content together.

It’s not that they don’t love each other. They do, even still, just as Jo loved Amy even as she flew at her for burning the manuscript. Only this time the ice that’s grown between them doesn’t crack with realization at the sound of a child’s body plunging into a frozen pond. It doesn’t melt, standing too close to the fireplace. It grows and grows, like the coldest of winters, crusting over the lock on a mailbox in the woods that nobody uses anymore because neither of them has anything left to say.


	2. “I don’t believe you’ve got any heart”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “Foolish to Think (she’s in love with you)”

It wasn’t that Jo lacked passion, exactly. No one who’d seen her in the heat of an argument could ever doubt that. And it wasn’t – whatever they said – that she was lacking in love, for Laurie or for anyone else.

No, Jo’s problem was romance, pure and simple.

Jo loved Laurie, but she wasn’t _in love_ with him. And he was - truly, madly, deeply – in love with Jo.

None of this was a secret between them.

At least, that was how it had seemed.

Laurie asked Jo to marry him. Begged really. And cajoled, and pleaded, and promised everything from the sun to the moon and the stars. And Jo said no.

Laurie said he loved her – that he’d love only her until his dying breath. And Jo said she’d tried, really she had, but she didn’t know how to make herself love him as he did her.

And he said okay. [In his heart, he was sure she’d find she loved him anyway.]

Everyone said you knew love when you felt it, but suddenly everyone around Jo was saying she didn’t know love at all. That Jo had some fantasy in her head of violent passions in a gothic story – of course she wouldn’t recognize true, down to earth love when she saw it.

And she said okay. [In her heart, she knew that wasn’t it.]

And Jo loved Laurie. She did – truly. Just as she loved Marmee and Beth and Meg and Amy.

But not as Meg loved John, or Marmee loved Father. Not the way Laurie loved Jo.

Laurie wrote Jo poems [for good or for ill] and played soulful phrases on the piano and embraced her in curtained alcoves when his grandfather wasn’t looking.

Jo didn’t. She wrote, as she always did, and sometimes the stories were for Laurie – but they were never love stories. She threw her arms around Laurie’s neck and grabbed his hand to dash about on adventures, but neither of those quite matched up to Laurie’s idea of a proper tryst.

Jo loved Laurie, but Laurie was in love with Jo – and in that, he was unrequited.

To be in a one sided affair with the person you are married to is a peculiar sort of predicament [and not one, generally, to be sought out]. Laurie was certain that Jo loved him and could be made to fall in love with him – or more precisely made to realize that she was in love with him. It was a state of perpetual anticipation.

It was a state of perpetual disappointment, which grew into perpetual resentment. Laurie, it turned out, was a jealous sort of fellow when he felt left out. Living with him began to feel rather like living with the Amy of Jo’s childhood. Just as Amy had tagged along to the frozen pond, and whined about going to the theatre, Laurie tagged along to Marmie’s and to Meg’s and whined whenever Jo tried to have meetings with publishers – until Jo felt rather like tearing her hair out.

And, just as with Amy in her childhood, Jo’s response was nearly always to antagonize Laurie further – or at the very least to run away and hide, which in Laurie’s eyes amounted to much the same thing.

What did it matter, if Laurie brought Jo to London and Paris, if she wasn’t allowed to do anything there but hang on Laurie’s arm? What did it matter that she could invite the most interesting of society to their dinner table, if Laurie was going to brood at her every time she spoke with a man?

Laurie would come to hate Jo for not loving him, and Jo would come to hate Laurie for demanding of her something she simply couldn’t give. In another lifetime, either of them would have pitied the other for it. In this one, neither one could see past the hurt in their own hearts.


	3. “A fine mistress for your fine house”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “Some Girls (take pleasure in buying a fine trousseau)”

Sometimes, Jo, thought, they would all be happier if she and Laurie lived in her sister’s house, and Meg and John lived in theirs.

Meg actually enjoyed parties and society, and she would delight in spending all the money Laurie tried to throw at Jo for new dresses – Jo always made her a present of one, at her birthday or Christmas. And no, Jo had never really been one for housework, but she’d done it. And what wouldn’t she do now, happily even, for the smallest bit of privacy! Jo could almost picture herself the wife of a schoolmaster – or whatever it was John did for old Mister Laurence now – as long as he _wasn’t_ dull old Mister Brooke.

No. On second thought, Laurie wouldn’t be much good at the school master’s life. To be fair, Laurie wouldn’t be much good at _most_ kinds of work that didn’t involve spending his grandfather’s money or whatever. He’d been taught to think, not to know and to do. 

So they couldn’t _really_ live as Meg and John did, not the two of them.

But, couldn’t they give Meg and John the house, and the servants, and _most_ of the money, and keep just a little for themselves to run away and set up house in a little cottage hidden in the woods? Mister Thoreau had certainly done it.

They could set up house at Meg and John’s – or better yet, build themselves a hermitage on the edge of the property, between Marmee’s house and Mr. Laurence’s. And Meg could send a servant over with their supper, so Laurie wouldn’t have to suffer too terribly from Jo’s cooking – salt in the strawberries or cream left out to spoil. And Jo could write, and Laurie could play piano and gaze moodily into the distance all day, and not give a fig what anyone thought about either of them.

Only no one would let them get away with it, would they?

They had _obligations_. Because it turned out that you did have to work for inherited money, just as hard as Jo had ever worked for Aunt March only _not_ to be taken to Paris for her troubles. They hadn’t any money in their own right, so they had to behave themselves for Mr. Laurence’s sake, and then when he died they’d have to behave themselves for the business’s sake, or they’d wind up like Jo’s father without any money left.

So the high life meant making polite small talk, over boring dinner tables, seated next to men with the wrong opinions about everything and women who didn’t dare open their mouths except to describe the cut and color of a new dress. It meant the piano might be tuned regularly, but heaven forbid anyone play anything with the slightest hint of passion. It meant dancing only the proper steps, with the right one of them dancing the lady and the gentleman – no singed skirts or lemonade-stained gloves in sight. It meant going to the theatre and sitting in the boxes, where everyone else could watch you far more readily than you could see anything on the stage.

It meant Jo and Laurie always hiding tension behind a mask of polite inanity, strings wound so taught that in private they’d snap in the slightest gust of wind. It meant nursing an unvoiced hatred for everything Laurie’s kind of life was coming to represent – never mind how much he hated it too. It meant storming out from conversations, from dinner tables, from parties and sulking in an upstairs room. It meant begging Meg and Amy for lessons, because Jo wanted to _do better_ and then leaving them in a huff because they just couldn’t understand that it was _hard._

It meant Laurie taking business meetings to Boston, or sending Jo down to New York for a few weeks to keep her out of the way. It meant him gritting his teeth making the money and her ever-hesitant in spending it because if they’d had their druthers things would have been the other way ‘round.

It meant understanding that grand houses, for all their books and fine pianos, were nothing more than a sort of gilded cage; knowing why Laurie’s father would run off to Italy to make love to a musician, but also that doing it again would break the poor old man’s heart.

Someone said, once, that they hoped those March girls might be civilizing influence on the Young Mr. Laurence. Jo was fairly certain she wasn’t who they’d had in mind.


	4. “I gave up billiards and everything you didn’t like”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “Trouble (with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pool)”

If you asked, both Jo and Laurie might tell you that they’re Romantics. The trouble is, she’ll be thinking of Wollstonecraft, while he pictures something more in the vein of Byron or Shelley. Only they don’t know that there’s a difference. Yet.

For their honeymoon, they go to Paris. Of course they do. They plan to romp their way through half of Europe, but Paris is the only place to start. Paris – this marriage – means freedom to them both.

Jo will stride through the streets in a gentleman’s waistcoat – newly tailored – and Laurie will swan about in not much more than a waistcoat himself. Jo will make waves in the salons, and Laurie will relax into them, letting the conversations wash over him as he washes down another glass of wine. They’ll go to the theatre, the opera, the ballet.

Jo will want to critique the plot and the performances – loudly, right there on the street outside the theatre, not caring who hears her. Laurie will have fallen just a little bit in love – perhaps with the music, or a voice, or a fine profile on the stage. In the end, the conversation won’t amount to much.

Jo will stay up half the night, writing away – she’ll leave ink-stains on her fingers, on Laurie’s brand new shirtsleeves, on the smooth white sheets at the hotel. Laurie will stay out half the nights at his club, and she won’t notice until the small hours of the morning, when she puts down her pen and turns to see the doorway of an empty room. He’ll feel abandoned, and so will she. If you wouldn’t…If you’d only…

And that’s merely where the fights begin.

Jo’s too willing to flout convention, and he’s too willing to succumb to it. The radical has a rigid moral code of her own, and expects him to follow it – the rules be damned but her values will always guide her. His is an everyday-kind of youthful rebellion – he’s always happy to bust through the strictures of polite society, but too many whispers about the pair of them, and he’ll lose the treasured society of the boys he makes trouble with. 

While Laurie is sowing wild oats in his grandfather’s fields, Jo wants to take up the plowshare and turn it into a sword. They used to think they’d make trouble in tandem, only it turns out they’re pushing two different sides of the envelope - and sooner or later, it’s going to burst at the seams.

Jo develops Opinions about everything; Laurie develops an interest in absinthe and opium. Jo makes words into men and women that aren’t really there, and Laurie makes love to people in apartments that aren’t theirs.

What one calls virtues, the other calls vices, and inevitably, the middle-ground between them becomes a castle in the air.


	5. “Everyone expects it”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “People Will Say We’re in Love”

When you are ten, or twelve, or twenty and you look at a girl with fondness, you’re told you’re feeling one thing. And when you look at a boy, you’re told you feel something else. So it matters very much whether the person in question is called Jo or Joe, and whether you are called Laurey or Laurie, because it turns out that you will be told two very different things indeed.

So whether you are ten, or twelve, or twenty, the first time you look at the girl next door and think, ‘I want to laugh with her for the rest of my life,’ the next thing you’re going to think is, ‘I must be in love with her.’ And two thoughts after that, you’ll probably be thinking, vaguely, about finding her a ring.

Because that’s the pattern, see. That’s how you spend the rest of your life laughing together: a ring, and then a wedding, and a house, and a family. And then mini-you and mini-her are running up and down the halls like – well, like brother and sister. Because _you_ can’t run around indefinitely like brother and sister if you aren’t. People will talk.

People are already talking.

Jo wants to be at school; Jo deserves to be at school; and, quite frankly, Jo would enjoy being at school a million times more than you do, so is it any wonder that she’s always on your mind? When you’re so often thinking of ‘enjoying this for Jo’s sake,’ is it any wonder that you talk of her so much? And once everyone at school knows that Jo is Josephine, it won’t be long at all before she becomes “Laurence’s girl-back-home.”

And, the thing is, maybe you don’t mean to, but you’ll start believing it eventually. It’s not as if the girls here ever do anything to put her out of your mind. And the boys they’re attached to? Well, forever isn’t exactly at the forefront of your thoughts.

Why would it be? Women may settle into half-respectable Boston marriages, but there’s something that sounds too dilettante even for you about being a Confirmed Bachelor for the rest of your life.

So Jo is the obvious choice – the only choice, really. And maybe you fool yourself into being in love with her, or maybe you really believe it. Because no one ever taught you it was possible to love a girl – deeply, fondly, endlessly love her – without being in love.

They only ever taught you _who_ you could love, not _how_. No one ever taught you that family could look like houses right next door to each other, with a mailbox in between. So instead, you’ll try to cram your family into a box that doesn’t suit you. That doesn’t fit either of you – much less the both of you together – and never has.

But this is what family should look like, so you want the white picket fence, because you want to do it _right_. Except doing it the right way only ever feels _wrong_. Your wife shouldn’t have to work, but she _longs_ to, and you’ll both be miserable if she doesn’t. You both _ought_ to be faithful, even if neither has ever been what the other really wants.

But neither of you knows how to speak those things. Asking for what you want has rarely gotten either of you anywhere – too many rules in your house, and not enough money in hers – and you’re both too afraid of hurting the other’s feelings to tell each other that this isn’t it.

So you muddle on together – until together is separate bedrooms, separate evenings, spending all your time in separate parts of the house. Until together becomes a wall you’ve built between you, and you can’t remember the last time you made one another laugh.


	6. “We’ll be good friends all our lives”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or “Marry Me, a Little (love me just enough)”

In a storybook ending, happily ever after is always preceded by wedding bells, so a person could be excused for thinking that they are one and the same.

If Jo were in a novel, she knows how the story would end. The boy gets the girl, the girl gets the boy – and the house, and money, and all the comforts and securities that she has always been without. Amy thought that was a happy ending, but Jo? Jo knew that really, it was only the start.

If Jo’s life were a novel, she knows how the publisher would demand it to end. But Jo’s an authoress, determination coursing through her veins and right out into her pen; so she’ll be damned if she doesn’t write it in her own way.

It wasn’t Laurie, who asked to join the Pickwick Society, oh so many moons ago. He wouldn’t have known to – and he wouldn’t have known how. No, Laurie didn’t ask to join, no matter what they said later. Jo invited him.

And it won’t be Laurie who asks for Jo’s hand in marriage. If she left it to him, he’d ask for the wrong things, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and she’d have to say no.

Oh, he’ll buy her a ring, eventually, and take her out on the pond where Amy almost drowned or leave it in the post-box for her, so that they’ll have a story; but it isn’t _exactly_ a marriage that Jo’s going to propose.

It will be a Bostonian Marriage, of sorts; or a _Concord_ one – her own spin on things like her father and his transcendentalist friends. An arrangement. A business partnership as much as anything. Or maybe Amy isn’t so wrong about marriages being a transactional affair.

Jo will marry Laurie, and set up house with him, in their own way. But they will do it as best friends. As two individuals, whose identities remain their own. Jo needs freedom and adventure in her life, and Laurie has the resources to jaunt around the world with her. Laurie, whatever he maintains, needs stability – and Jo, whatever she maintains, is at heart as steady as they come.

They’ll spend a lifetime ducking into alcoves with each other to laugh at other party guests, and when the music changes to something more lively, Laurie will spin Jo about the room. They’ll dance with reckless abandon, not caring if they’re cannoning into other couples or whether Jo’s dress starts a whole new fashion for singed skirts. 

It won’t, of course, because in a better-heated house, she won’t be drawn so near to the fireplace. But maybe, just maybe, they’ll start inviting their own set of guests, of the social class to adopt the ersatz fashion in Jo’s stead.

Together, they’ll befriend the right sort of bohemians – the ones who get lost in ideas and symphonies, not in the depths of the liquor cabinet. They’ll be the talk of the neighborhood in the best way, not the worst. “Did you _hear_ what was being discussed at the Laurence’s last night?”

At the end of the evening, they retire to separate bedrooms, as most well-to-do married couples do. When the door between them is closed, Jo slips Laurie pages of stories from her midnight writings, and Laurie sends back clever little notes – or sometimes soulful ones, from the wee hours of the morning when his mind keeps him awake. Laurie jokes that they ought to install a mail flap.

Other nights, the door is opened, and one of them – missing Beth, or caught up in the longing for something out of reach – crosses the threshold, and the other opens their arms, and they hold each other until the fresh light of day.

Theirs is not a traditional marriage, by any means. They won’t begrudge each other lovers, and neither expects children in any traditional sense. They’ll wind up with a house full of them anyway, though: Meg and Amy take to calling them Jo’s strays. Brooke’s successor is a homely German scholar in need of a place to teach, and Jo, like her father before her, takes in any pupil deemed a poor fit for the village school.

One day, a precocious grandniece will say they’re all a little like lost boys – never growing up. And Jo will say she never wanted to anyhow; but she sure is glad she had a friend with her, to grow old with. And even unto the last, they will be Jo and Laurie, in bond of friendship, hand in hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter titles come from the book's proposal scene, chapter summaries come from various parts of the musical theatre cannon.
> 
> Each chapter is definitely a different version of Jo and Laurie - some (but not all) very much influenced by a particular adaptation (not all of which can be tagged on the site). Any guesses which goes with which?


End file.
